30 Days of Work Stats in 90 Seconds

I’ve written about speeding up my work day in the past. I even took the time to turn it into a rather simplistic ds106 video assignment. For me, altering the speed of a video clip feels like a cheap emotional trick (not that I’m not above easy emotional manipulation).

So I wanted to give 60 minutes of my time in front of computer a twist that would hopefully give it a more thoughtful glimpse into my work day. It also gave me an opportunity to see what I could glean from Google’s Account Activity tool. It’s a terribly useful (or frightening depending on the results) cursory look at the number of emails sliding on and out of your inbox, videos you’ve watched on YouTube, and a few other bits of analytics. In the last 30 days I’ve received more than 1200 emails. That’s an average of 40 emails a day finding their way to my inbox, and while that’s a startlingly high number, I suspect there are many people in positions like mine that would consider that just one week’s worth of email traffic. I dedicate this video to them.

The stats provided by Google, and a few that I gathered myself, gave me the opportunity to reflect on how much time my job requires me to spend on clerical, bureaucratic, and otherwise administrative communication. This communication is the cornerstone of how I’m able to get anything done. While this video doesn’t reflect the much larger amount of face-to-face time that I spend working with students and teachers in my district, it’s the digital dissemination and collaboration that serves as the glue between the joints of physical meetings and one-on-one instructional time.

I’m curious now to look at my data for the next 30 days, to see if there’s a drastic difference between the first month of the school year and the second; we have standardized testing happening throughout October, routines have been established and require much less monitoring to work, and I’ll be transitioning into more face-to-face time for lunch and learns and small group meetings. I’ll have to try and remember to come back and revisit this post, or at the very least, compare the stats to see if I can establish a baseline of what a “normal” workload looks like for me.